191. Core (III)
Zane made his way to the Warrior Dojo. Irina Volkova's last stand was still stuck in his mind.
He saw how easily the Minotaur had crushed her. She hadn't been weak at all either. It just wasn't a fair fight.
That level of power… he had never seen anything like it. The Minotaur was labelled a 'Monster Knight.' He had never seen that either. It wasn't just any Level 255. The kind of Law, of Essence, of Bloodline that thing had. And it had spoken. He hadn't known Monsters could do that.
It was there to destroy the mightiest of the Earthlings. That was what it said. That struck something deep within him.
He knew that was not Irina Volkova, strong as she was.
As far as Zane was concerned, that Monster had just sent him a naked challenge. And killed her as added insult. He had not known her. It wasn't like him to get worked up like this—even he didn't fully understand why he felt so heated. Something about the way it killed her… in a way that was meant for him, too…
He gritted his teeth.
In that moment he knew—his path and that Minotaur's would cross. Very, very soon.
And he would take that brute power head-on.
He was still stuck on it. He was thinking what would have happened if he was there instead of Irina. Setting the might of his body against its own… his heart. His soul. Said he could take it. He was burning to take it here and now.
In his mind he tried to see it as clearly as he could. And then… he was not sure.
He clenched his fists.
He had to get stronger.
Just to get in the door of the Superdungeon, he needed more.
He knew what he had to do.
He saw the Monsters running wild across the mountains too—they were all Core Beasts. A flood of S-ranked dungeon Bosses. You could count the number of people who could stop those things on one hand. And more kept coming—if they weren't stopped now, they would swallow continents. They would swallow everything. Reina would do her best to keep their own safe. But she would need him there too.
He walked into the lobby. Saw a dazed handful of folk standing aimlessly, staring aimlessly. The white-haired receptionist greeted him, stammering—got quickly out of the way. He must have seen Zane was on a mission.
"Unless Reina, or Avery, or Evan is in imminent danger. Do not disturb me," he said. "Do you understand?"
"Y-Yes!"
He made his way up the private elevator. Stepped out into his cultivation room—bare bamboo walls, no distractions. The floor was a simple tatami mat. Essence poured in from pores in the walls, making a haze, as though an early morning mist…
He sat down. Tapped his bag of holding, set some S-ranked Vials of Essence before him.
Took a deep breath. In, out. He had to settle himself a little. He couldn't do this angry, amped up.
It took longer than usual.
When he felt back to normal—normal enough—he drank deeply. And closed his eyes, letting it dissolve through him…
He sat there, and waited. Let it warm him down to his fingertips, felt a sense of burgeoning fullness, like he'd just finished a deeply satisfying meal…
A breath in, a breath out.
The fullness was spreading through him, flowing down his body—it had nowhere to go.
It started to collapse inward.
It was beginning.
Starting from the edges of his body, the fingers, the arms, the ear-tips, and toes, moving up, drawing in… essence slowly deserted his limbs. Drew ever-inward, and then he was in a terribly vulnerable position all of a sudden. But he had locked himself here for a reason.
He could not be disturbed. Things were growing critical.
A dot. A single glowing dot of essence, piercing bright, at the centermost part of his body.
Folds of essence began to smother it. Settling over it, over and over—wrapping it layer after layer… it felt like adding clay.
It was coming together naturally, every last sheet of essence winding further and further in. A slow, careful process.
…It looked kind of clumsy, now that he looked carefully at it. Each layer was done the same way. It kept leaving gaps in the middle—and when those gaps got wrapped over, it changed the structure of the Core. Leaving seams in the middle as it ran its natural course.
Zane frowned. …Was that supposed to happen? It looked ugly to him. It looked like weakness.
But it also felt the natural thing to do to let it finish its course—there was some greater power guiding the path, the way a riverbed guides the river.
..Hmm.
Then again—why did he have to follow what nature wanted of him? He did not have to do what everyone else did. It bothered him.
He could fix this. He knew he had the tools.
He honed in on his forming Core and reached out with Emperor's Soul.
He tried directing the essence. Peeling it back, filling it in—
It didn't work that way, he instantly found out. He couldn't do it any more than he could force water to flow uphill… he'd have to blow up the whole thing if he wanted to start over. What was done was done—but he could still guide the shape of the future. He felt it.
So he set his mind to his essence, and tried.
He quickly discovered he was not very good at it.
It did not feel intuitive at all. It did not come easy to him, and it was a matter of the soul—he had never felt this before.
The first layer he tried packing on, he left more gaps than if he did nothing.
The second layer too.
Same with the third.
But he was frowning now, and too stubborn to give it up—he could feel he was getting better at least. And there were lots of layers to go.
He squeezed out a few more gaps the fourth layer. And the fifth.
It would take about two dozen before he was doing on par as if he did nothing.
He kept going. One by one, like some sculptor packing on clay, trying to mold it just right. It was surprisingly draining on his soul—each layer took quite an effort.
If not for Emperor's Soul, and also his unusually large soul to begin with, there was no way he would've been able to keep this up.
But keep it up he did. And soon he began falling into a rhythm. Carefully, layer after layer… he fell into a kind of flow. Just him, and all that essence, and a slowly burgeoning Core. A Core getting better and better…
After a few dozen more layers, he felt he was getting pretty good at this stuff.
Another few dozen, and he wasn't leaving big gaps anymore. Only little ones. But they were still there—like those tiny air bubbles that got trapped in steel, making it just slightly less dense. But it'd add up over time. It would matter in the grand scheme.
He had to keep getting better. He kept stacking, and stacking, and stacking…
He had no clue how much time had passed in the real world. He didn't know he had the stamina to go for a while longer, soul-wise. He used less effort the more he did it too. He could go a few hours of getting better at it. He wondered if it was some kind of new skill, or if he was just honing Emperor's Soul.
He got his answer pretty soon.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕖𝕕!
ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕖 ℂ𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟
Oh.
Each little fold yielded fewer and fewer bubbles too. Until he hit the last few layers—and found just one or two each layer.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕖 ℂ𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀
That was the annoying thing. He could sense a real difference between almost perfect and perfect.
But that was it. He'd got it as best as he could.
The whole thing was starting to congeal now. To harden…
He was decently happy with it. The first third of those layers—not great. The second third was okay. The last third, especially once he leveled Core Creation to III, was close to perfect. Almost seamless.
He had to get it as good as he could, he knew—he felt the weight of the kind of task he was up against.
He needed as much strength as he could get.
As far as results went, though, there wasn't much he could have done he felt. This Skill was so specific. There was no way he could have trained it beforehand, not without actually doing it. He couldn't have done much better in one go.
The Core kept solidifying.
As it came together, he felt its growing density—it far surpassed the grade of those Bosses of the Deep Sea. He wasn't sure how it compared to the Minotaur. He wasn't there to feel it. But it had to be at least on par. Probably better. He doubted the Minotaur had the tools Zane did.
The only thing was… he wasn't sure whose Core was bigger. Who had more essence. Zane was always big for his level. But the Minotaur had 55 levels on him.
Hm.
Zane saw it sealing up.
It still bothered him. Something about this… it did not please his soul to have a Core that was not as pure, as dense, as it could be.
ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕤𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕕𝕚𝕗𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘…
𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕕𝕖: 𝕊𝕦𝕡𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕠𝕣
Then, on a whim, he had an idea.
He frowned deeper at it. Probed with Emperor's soul, dug deep to the very Core of that Core, to the starting thread of it—reached all the way in…
He felt where it all began. That little dot.
He couldn't turn back the course of the river. But could he start over?
If he pulled on that dot, it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, he felt. It could all come undone—there would be consequences. A backlash… He wasn't sure how big. But he could do it. It would mean destroying everything, though.
It was just a matter of asking himself. Could he tolerate weakness within him? Or did he want to be the strongest?
Then the choice was easy.
He pulled hard. Just as the last of the essence was hardening.
It was not an easy thing—it had almost wholly solidified now. It resisted him. But once he forced it, gritting his teeth, it came quick.It felt like he set off a bomb inside himself. It didn't totally explode but there was a violent backlash of essence, breaking against the walls of his body, of his soul, before washing back—he spat out a mouthful of blood. It felt like his insides were burning.
He examined himself again.
His essence swirled about inside him, an upset sea… but it was all there. All the raw materials—he'd recollected them.
He waited to see if he would explode.
He did not explode.
He smiled.
Well, then.
He still felt unstable—his essence was still tipped over the edge. He was stranded between Level 199 and Level 200. There was no going back now, no time to recover his soul fatigue. He felt his essence start pulling in again, start congealing on that point—he could go again. He felt a little winded, that was all. He was confident he had another Core Formation inside him.
He started winding essence over essence. Layer after layer. He felt less like some pottery student slapping on clay now. More like a sculptor. There was a precision to how he wound it. Layer after layer—admitting only the littlest of gaps each time.
He fell back into that trance. Wielded his soul slowly, methodically… each time and nearly the same movement over and over and over—making little micro-adjustments—
It was excellent practice.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕖 ℂ𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕀𝕀 -> 𝕄𝔸𝕏
And now when he layered it on it came seamless. Not a single void, not a smidge of a gap.
The next layer molded perfectly to the first too, so you couldn't even tell them apart. And the one after that, and after that… the last third of the layers was a work of art. A solid, beautiful block of essence… it made a shocking amount of difference. Somehow when it came to the integrity of the thing, 98% and 99% were almost the same. But 99% and 100%, there was a world of difference. Zane found it hard to explain. He just saw it, felt it—perfect purity was something else…
ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕊𝕠𝕝𝕚𝕕𝕚𝕗𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘…
𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕕𝕖: ℙ𝕖𝕒𝕜
This essence was something else. He was certain the density was greater than the Minotaur's. Just the way it looked—so thick it was almost corporeal. So strong it was a blinding thread in the astral plane—you couldn't even make out the edges… he could only imagine how strong Skills powered by this would be.
Strangely, Zane was almost less happy with this one than the last one.
Probably because how close he was to perfect. He was right there.
He did feel kind of exhausted, though. He wasn't sure he had another Formation in him. It was almost perfect anyway. It would have to do.
He told himself this.
He told himself this again. It had to be better than the Cores of almost every Core creature alive already.
He thought about this being inside him. He thought about carrying those tiny weaknesses with him. About it stopping him from being the strongest he could be.
Was that who he was?
He hesitated. He groaned.
Grabbed that prime thread. And yanked.
He ended up bloody-mouthed, exhausted… with nothing.
For now. He spat the blood out of his mouth. His eyes went hard, bright.
One last try. For all the marbles.
He gave it everything he had.